a word to the wise: my letter to president trump

November 20, 2018

President Donald Trump

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Trump:

You call yourself a nationalist. People on the left, of course, think that nationalism is a bad thing in and of itself, but I think it depends what purpose nationalism is harnessed to. If it were harnessed to the cause of dealing effectively with climate change, it would be a very good thing indeed.

The problem is, you don’t acknowledge the reality of man-made climate change, and as long as you don’t, other countries—notably China—will corner the market on the emerging technologies that deal with it, many of which we actually invented. Is that really what you want?

No, instead, we should try to control the commanding heights of these environmental technologies ourselves. We should dominate the market in them. We should also emphasize environmental nationalism rather than military nationalism. If we limited our military to a truly defensive posture—just enough to make sure that nobody tangles with us or our allies— we could devote a significant portion of the savings to research and development for renewables, energy conservation, carbon removal, maybe nuclear power.

You should summon up all of the nation’s intellectual, economic, and social resources to deal with this crisis. In the wake of the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Eisenhower proposed and Congress approved, on a bipartisan basis, the National Defense Education Act. The purpose of the act was to train more scientists and mathematicians to meet the Soviet challenge. Later, President Kennedy set the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. This was an explicitly nationalist goal, yet it wasn’t criticized on that account. Although Kennedy never lived to see it, the goal was realized in 1969. Rather than a National Defense Education Act, we need a National Climate and Energy Education Act to train the nation’s youth to address the climate crisis. Beyond that, we need to marshal all the nation’s resources to meet this challenge.

Toward that end, we should create a Climate and Energy Research Projects Agency (CERPA) based on the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

You should become an environmental nationalist. Then the adversary wouldn’t be ‘the climate’—that’s too abstract. No, the adversary would then become China. Everybody can understand that. I certainly don’t want the Chinese controlling these technologies. Do you?

You pride yourself on being a realist, but you’re not being realistic about this at all. You’re being woefully, willfully ignorant about the reality of man-made climate change. You should take a tip from the medieval English king Canute. In order to counter the assertion of some flattering courtiers that he was above even natural laws, Canute set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet of course the tide continued to rise as usual and dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. So King Canute leapt backwards, saying, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” In other words, nobody—not even you—can defy the laws of physics and chemistry.

A word to the wise, pal.

Yours etc.,

Jonathan Greenblume